A Moment in the Void
by hallow777
Summary: Rose falls into the void in "Doomsday" and although the Doctor can't save her, there is someone else that can but there are conditions that have to be met first. In order to preserve timelines, Rose can't come back until late in his eleventh body. Will she stay with him now that he has yet another new face? Will he even want her to stay?
1. Chapter 1

**Written for the New Who Fic Olympics on Tumblr.**

**Representing USA Eleven/Rose section in the Junior Ski Jump.**

**Chapter 1 of 2**

* * *

Sparks flew from the lever, and the Doctor's hearts sank.

"Offline."

_No._

Before his rather impressive brain could figure out how to get him across the room without being sucked in, Rose was already way ahead of him.

_No, not like this._

He watched and all he could do was hold tighter to his clamp, praying to every deity he knew that she would be able to get the lever back up and hang on.

"Online and locked."

"Rose, hold on!" he shouted, pleaded even.

But he knew. Oh, he knew.

He was having a hard enough time hanging on himself and he still had his arms around the clamp and his feet on the ground while she was hanging on by her fingertips.

And then, she wasn't.

"Rose!"

He let go of his clamp and started hurtling towards her, but it was too late. She disappeared into the light just as the portal started warping and closed right in front of his face, leaving him to slam into the wall at a speed that would have seriously hurt a human but only stunned him.

He slid down the wall and just stayed there, not daring to move in the hopes that this wasn't real.

It couldn't be real.

This couldn't have happened.

He couldn't have let this happen.

_No._

It only took a few seconds of lying there before he sprang to his feet with determination and rushed back to his TARDIS.

He could rip the portal back open. He could. No matter if it would let all the daleks and cybermen back out, as long as he had Rose back it didn't matter.

He would go personally kill every single one if he had to.

He could do this.

Except, he couldn't.

Not even with the power that he got from orbiting the largest supernova he could find was enough to open the portal back up since he had done such a good job of making sure it it would seal itself up tight.

Even the TARDIS manual was not able to help him and when the pages finally gave up and just started literally telling him it was impossible, he opened the TARDIS doors and chucked it right into the heart of the supernova.

As the doors shut, he turned back around, slowly starting to realize that it was hopeless. There was no way of opening the portal again that wouldn't rip apart the entire universe and it wouldn't be much help to Rose if there was nothing for her to come back to because he had destroyed it all.

And if he was very, very honest with himself, he knew there was no way she would still be alive anyway. She would have disintegrated immediately after going into the void even though it would have felt like forever to her.

That thought, of her being alone, afraid, and probably in pain, caused his stomach to churn with guilt but as he turned away from the doors he noticed a woman in a wedding dress standing by his console.

"What?"

* * *

It was hot and cold, light and dark all at once. It felt like time was flying by but could have been standing still for all Rose knew.

She remembered falling into the void and so thats where she assumed she was now. It felt like she had been there a while already, but she wasn't sure. This place was so weird. It felt like everything and nothing was happening all at once.

Cybermen and Daleks surrounded her but they either didn't care or didn't know that she was there and slowly-or maybe quickly- they each started to disappear until she was the only one left.

With a choked scream that was both deafeningly loud and silent at the same time, she started disappearing too.

When the daleks and cybermen disappeared it just seemed like they were there and then they weren't, she didn't know that it would hurt this bad. It felt like little tiny pieces of her were being ripped apart.

_It hurts, Doctor, it hurts._

Her thoughts were a chaotic mess but the Doctor was always a constant in her mind. She just hoped that, somehow, he would be able to get past this and not blame himself for this.

The world would go on without Rose Tyler, but she wasn't sure how long the world would have gone on without the Doctor to save it if he had gotten sucked in instead.

_Doctor…_

She could feel it, she was almost gone. She wasn't sure if she still had a body anymore, it was just that everything was in pain.

There was just one last thing she had to say, even if he would never get to hear it.

"Doctor, I-"

_love you._

Darkness and silence reigned as the last being in the void slipped away, a smile on her face from her final thoughts.

And then, there was light.

Rose gasped and her lungs burned with air that didn't exist as memories from the Game Station flooded into her head, allowing her to remember everything she had forgotten about that day. The golden light that had shot out of her body started to recede until her skin was just faintly glowing as the last bits of her memory clicked into place and two words came to mind.

_Bad Wolf._

* * *

She didn't know how much more of this she could take. It was the same thing over and over again. Bad Wolf would bring her back, only to have her disintegrate sometime later.

Funny thing, disintegrating never got any less painful and she was tired of it. There was no way out, she had tried anything and everything she could think of- which was, admittedly not much- but there was no end or even really a beginning to this place.

There was no hope of her ever getting out so what was the point of this continual cycle? It was just survival instinct kicking in that was causing this… regeneration? She wasn't sure what to call it as it wasn't quite like the Doctor's regenerations, she didn't change appearance or anything, she just came back.

If she didn't have the constant presence of the golden light of Bad Wolf in her mind to keep her company she would have driven herself insane long ago. And even though she wasn't exactly sure they were still separate anymore it had it's limits. Bad Wolf had the power to see everything before, but there just wasn't anything to see or feel in the Void.

Everything existed in the void but nothing did as well. Everything was distorted and nothing made sense so all she could see with Bad Wolf was the equivalent of white static noise.

Only worse, much worse.

And she was so tired of it all. With no hope of anything ever being any different, she just wanted to be done.

Suddenly there was _something_ brushing against and seeking out Bad Wolf so she took the chance and grabbed on tight, not willing to let this miracle of a chance go.

It had been a long time since she had bothered actually opening her physical eyes- because really, there wasn't any point- but when she did this time, there was an older man with white hair in a very worn out leather coat standing in front of her looking confused and vaguely angry.

"Who are you?" They both asked at the same time. Rose could feel the man trying to pull away from her mental grip but she was holding tight.

"Let me go," the man said just as Rose pleaded, "Take me with you!"

"I can not. I was only searching for an interface that would be pleasing for this user. It would be impossible for this form to pull you from here, even if I wished to do so," the man said in an uncaring voice that did not seem to suit him at all.

Rose sighed but tried not to look as defeated as she felt. "Well, you can at least stay and talk to me for a mo'. I've been here for so long, I think, by myself so tell me about you. Like what's with that old leather coat? It's about time to put it to rest, don'tcha think?"

"This is the form of my user. I do not have a 'myself' I am the interface of a weapon that has been placed in storage for centuries," the man stopped, looking as if he just thought of something, " and it is time for me to go."

"Wait!" Rose cried out, trying to physically grab onto him when he forcibly broke the mental grip she had on him and turned away, "Please! Please take me with you! I can't be here anymore. I just can't."

He turned back around and looked back at her, " I can not."

One step backwards was all it took for him to disappear and she started to feel the familiar pain of disintegration.

_No more. I can't do this anymore. I'm sorry, but please, please just let me go this time. I can't do this._

As she closed her eyes, she started thinking about all the time she had spent with the Doctor, wanting to remember every bit of it right until the end.

She remembered seeing his horrified face when the lever started to fail just as she felt her mind grow darker and darker, knowing that this time she wasn't going to be brought back by golden light.

_Goodbye, Doctor-_

"Weeeeeeeeeeeellllll," golden light flared back to life as the tone of that voice caused her to immediately think of the Doctor even though that voice was definitely not his. In fact, it really sounded like…

She opened her eyes again and saw herself standing in front of her wearing some god awful combination of old and ratty clothes.

"I lied, a bit. It's not that I can't save you, it's just that I didn't really want to. Never been much fond of humans so I didn't really care about one little human stuck in the Void but I've been in your head and I've been in his. I've seen what could and what should happen and I'm giving you a choice. You can stay here and perish, or I can bring you out but there will be… conditions and I must warn you, your future will not be easy." The rag wearing Rose spread her arms out wide and continued, "So, Rose Tyler, what will you choose?"

She knew absolutely nothing about this person other than the fact that it had to be the same person as the man from earlier so the choice was obvious, right?

* * *

The console flickered in warning and the Doctor quickly shouted, "Clara, grab onto something. We're going down!"

Clara had just enough time to grab the railing before the TARDIS seemed to lose all power and plummeted out of the vortex.

"What's going on?" Clara yelled as the Doctor frantically pulled levers and flipped switches, trying to get the TARDIS back online.

"I don't know! It's like shes rerouting the power somewhere. Where! Where are you taking the power to?"

He slammed his hands on the console just as the power came back on just in time to stop them from crashing. Once the console screen was back up he could see just where the power had been rerouted too.

"The attic!"


	2. Chapter 2

**Alright, so I lied. This story got a little bit out of hand and will be a bit more than the expected two chapters.**

* * *

_"Yes, please. Just get me out of here," Rose pleaded with the Other Rose, the one in ratty clothes. It briefly occurred to her that she should probably wonder what in the world was going on and who this was that looked like her and how it looked like that man earlier but she really didn't care at the moment, she just wanted to be out of this hell._

_Other Rose raised an eyebrow at her, "Don't you want to hear the conditions before you agree?"_

_"Nope, I don't care what you do I just want out. What do I need to do?"_

_Other Rose grinned a little evilly and replied, "You? You don't need to do anything, except of course, survive."_

* * *

A sudden intake of air had her choking on the dust that had taken residence on the TARDIS attic floor. Rose sputtered and coughed as she lifted her face off the hard floor and looked around, taking in all the shelves that held various trinkets but as her eyes landed on a box that was in front of her, it started to glow and her head immediately started pounding with the worst headache of her life.

She curled up on the floor with her knees to her chest and head in her hands as memories that were not hers flooded into her head.

And that's the sight the Doctor saw as he rushed through the doors to the attic.

* * *

_"What do you mean 'just survive', haven't I been doing that already?" Rose crossed her arms and glared at Other Rose, if she was just joking about getting her out of here she swore that she would get revenge, somehow._

_"I mean," Other Rose said, drawing out the vowels, " that one of the conditions is that in order to preserve something that happened in his timeline I can not bring you back until a certain point in his timeline. That would-" Rose was looking more and more irritated each word she spoke since it was making absolutely no sense so Other Rose started a different way, "Basically, I'm from his past but he can't remember me until late in his eleventh body and if I bring you back to where you were when you fell in the void during his tenth body then he would remember me and things would not progress as they should."_

_"Eleventh body? Just how far in the future am I going to be for him?" Rose asked worriedly, maybe it's too far. Maybe he would have forgotten her by then._

_"Since you got trapped in the void? Eh about 300 years," Other Rose said casually while Rose went pale._

_"Three hundred years? He's definitely forgotten me by then."_

_"He hasn't."_

_"But three hundred years? Thats-" Rose was cut off by a very irritated sounding Other Rose._

_"Not much time for a Time Lord. If you would rather die here I can leave, you know. I don't really care to deal with human emotions."_

_"No! I mean, I still want to go. I don't want to stay here anymore but he... Never mind. It doesn't matter. Why are you doing this anyway? Helping me? You said something about seeing the future but you seem like someone who wouldn't do something without getting something in return so what's the catch here."_

_Other Rose gave a toothy grin, "Smart girl. You are right, I do get something out of this..."_

* * *

"Doctor? What's going on? Who is that and how did she get on the TARDIS?" Clara asked tugging on his jacket as the Doctor stood there frozen in shock.

"She's..." he said as he snapped out of it and rushed over to her side, sweeping the sonic screwdriver over her to make sure she was okay then checking for a pulse with his fingers just to be double sure.

"She's...?" Clara tried to prompt him to tell her more but he just shook his head and scooped up Rose in his arms and headed to the medical bay.

"She's dead."

* * *

_"I have been locked up in those vaults for centuries and it used to not bother me, I kept myself pretty entertained spying on all the time lords and such. You'd be amazed at how beings so smart could get things so wrong sometimes. But then one time lord in particular broke into the vaults and stole me and I got a taste of the outside world for the first time in centuries. He, of course, didn't take me back to the vaults but instead stuck me in that attic of his and then completely forgot about me. Which was my doing because he had to forget but that doesn't matter."_

_"So you want me to get you out of the TARDIS attic? Why would he lock a person up in the attic?" Rose asked._

_"I'm not a person, I am a machine. A very deadly machine."_

_"So I'm supposed to carry you around, or something? Can I even carry you?"_

_"Yes. No. Sort of. What you see here is just a visual interface. I am a sentient machine and I can do many, many things and I could make a physical body for myself easy but without something to fill it up essentially, a 'soul' I think you humans call it, it would be empty."_

_"So basically, you want to steal my soul?" Rose said with just a little bit of panic in her voice, she wanted out of here that's for sure but there was no way she was going to let this thing take her soul and body. Especially if this thing intended to hurt the Doctor._

_Other Rose huffed, "No, that's impossible. I will make you a physical body and then put your 'soul' in it. I'll just be along for the ride."_

_"So you're like a parasite then? You aren't making this deal sound very promising, you know." Rose said and then she was pretty sure Other Rose mumbled something that sounded like, "Ugh, humans."_

_"I'll show you. It will be easier." Other Rose took a step forward and Rose took a step back then the next thing Rose knew, Other Rose was in front of her with her fingers on her temples, causing images to flash before her eyes._

* * *

"She's dead?" Clara asked as she hurried behind the Doctor down the hallway to the med bay.

"What?" The Doctor stopped for just a fraction of a second then shook his head and kept going, "No. No, sorry. She... I meant... She will be okay, just knocked out. She was dead before though, or at least I thought so. She fell into the void." He made it to the med bay and the TARDIS opened the doors for him and he quickly placed Rose down on a bed before starting to hook her up to a couple machines that would make sure she was okay and hopefully what was the cause of her unconsciousness.

"The void? What's that?" Clara tried to help but she had never seen these machines before and decided she would probably be more helpful just keeping out of his way.

"It's basically the empty space between dimensions. No one can survive there, it's like nothing and everything happening all at once. I think it would be similar to what you humans call hell, just without the fire and devil and other such things."

"So how did she get back?" Clara watched as the Doctor plugged one last cord into machine then pulled a chair next to the bed he had placed her on and plopped down.

"I don't know, it shouldn't have been possible but Rose has always been pretty good at making things possible. I sent her home in the TARDIS once for her safety because I was going to die, I thought, and she ripped apart my TARDIS, looked into it's heart and managed to get back and save me."

"I thought you were the only one who could fly the TARDIS?" Clara pulled up another chair and sat down next to him.

"She didn't fly it, exactly. More like convinced this old girl to fly herself. She doesn't do that for just anyone."

"Yeah, I know. She just now lets me in without a fuss."

Clara and the Doctor talked for a little longer, hoping Rose would wake up soon but eventually Clara was too tired to stay up anymore and left to go lay down in the bedroom she used if she had to stay overnight on the TARDIS.

Hours later, during what would be the early, early morning hours TARDIS time, Rose began to stir.

* * *

**It will probably be clearer later on but for those wondering this takes place directly after the 50th anniversary episode and before the Christmas Special, obviously. The 50th ended with a scene with all the Doctors but this happens as he was taking Clara home after that.**


End file.
